Author Events

June 3, 2015

What Stevie Wonder really meant to sing was “no book launch Saturday within the month of June,” and with that in mind, here are some recent images from those book-related fêtes staged a smidge sooner, during the long green march of spring. *** Snapshots from the official book launch for The Big Jones Cookbook: Recipes for Savoring the Heritage of Regional Southern Cooking, featuring Chef (and author) Paul Fehribach, some of his clientele, and a band of University of Chicago Press culinary enthusiasts: A photograph from the Dublin launch of Gillian O’Brien’s Blood Runs Green: The Murder that Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago (these young readers are actually O’Brien’s nieces and nephew): And, finally, this photograph from Andrew Hartman’s talk about A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars at the In These Times HQ: To read more about books from Chicago’s most recent list, click here. . . .

September 15, 2014

This past week, Rachel Sussman’s colossal photography project—and its associated book—The Oldest Living Things in the World, which documents her attempts to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older, was profiled by the New Yorker: To find the oldest living thing in New York City, set out from Staten Island’s West Shore Plaza mall (Chuck E. Cheese’s, Burlington Coat Factory, D.M.V.). Take a right, pass Industry Road, go left. The urban bleakness will fade into a litter-strewn route that bisects a nature preserve called Saw Mill Creek Marsh. Check the tides, and wear rubber boots; trudging through the muddy wetlands is necessary. The other day, directions in hand, Rachel Sussman, a photographer from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, went looking for the city’s most antiquated resident: a colony of Spartina alterniflora or Spartina patens cordgrass which, she suspects, has been cloning and re-cloning itself for millennia. Not simply the story of a cordgrass selfie, Sussman’s pursuit becomes contextualized by the lives—and deaths—of our fragile ecological forbearers, and her desire to document their existence while they are still of the earth. In support of the project, Sussman has a series of upcoming events surrounding The Oldest Living Things in the World. You can . . .

May 23, 2014

Who is Burt Hooton? Your guess is as good as mine, or more likely, it’s better than mine. My answer is he’s no Mickey Lolich, but that’s because I grew up in Detroit—though, as Susan Sontag would say, Under the Sign of Jack Morris. But back to your guess—if you’re schooled in Cubs lore, come to the Wrigley Centennial Trivia Showdown on Wednesday, May 28th, at the Harold Washington Library, in celebration of the year that brought you the births of Sun Ra, Julio Cortázar, and a certain stadium. Your hosts are Stuart Shea, doyen of Cubs history, and the Chicago Tribune’s Rick Kogan, and you can win t-shirts, plates, commemorative posters, and gift certificates to Birrieria Zaragoza, Clark Street Sports, Girl and the Goat, The People’s Garment Company, & Tales, Taverns, and Towns. From the Chicago Reader: Stuart Shea, author of Wrigley Field: The Long Life and Contentious Times of the Friendly Confines, and the Tribune‘s Rick Kogan host the Wrigley Centennial Trivia Showdown. Test your knowledge of the legendary ballpark alongside other Cubs enthusiasts and maybe win a Wrigley Field prize pack, or bragging rights that might earn you a free drink or two around Clark and Addison. From the press release: . . .

April 4, 2014

Hillary L. Chute spent a significant portion of the past decade studying, hanging out with, and interviewing many of the artists whose iconic images have helped define contemporary graphic arts. In Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists, Chute collects these interviews in book form for the first time, delivering in-depth discussions with twelve of the most prominent and accomplished artists and writers in comics today, and revealing a creative community that is richly interconnected yet fiercely independent. The interviewees include Lynda Barry and Alison Bechdel, Charles Burns and Joe Sacco, and even a never-before published conversation between Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware. In addition to unparalleled access into the cartooning world, Outside the Box also puts narrative power into the hands of this cast of masters—without whom our eyes (and ears) would not take in such gripping stories. For Chicagoans, Chute will talk about the book and her experiences as documentarian and scholar of the cartooning community at two upcoming events: A discussion at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn, Thursday, April 10th, 6 PM A talk and signing at Quimby’s, 1854 W. North Ave., Saturday, April 19th, 7 PM To read more about Outside the Box, click here. . . .

February 20, 2014

October 21, 2013

Neil Verma’s work examines idiosyncratic and affective spaces in media history, often those whose eccentricity hinges on particularly interdisciplinary cultural turns. In Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, Verma engages with an archive of over six-thousand radio play recordings—including those penned by Norman Corwin, Wyllis Cooper, and Lucille Fletcher—in order to build a case for the radio drama as one of the most defining forms of mid-twentieth-century genre fiction. Most recently, Verma has been curating a series of web-based essays on the radio plays of Orson Welles at the Sound Studies blog, which will run until January 2014. October 30, 2013, marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of “The War of the Worlds,” initially aired by Welles as an episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air. To commemorate this, Verma will deliver a lecture and slideshow at the Music Box’s 35mm screening of Byron Haskin’s film War of the Worlds (1953) on October 27th and again at an airing of Welles’s original broadcast at Doc Films on October 29th. On top of this, Verma will helm a nationwide (!) stream and response via social media (hashtag: #WOTW75) to the original recording, in addition to a re-airing and . . .

November 5, 2010

This weekend marks the fifth annual NY Art Book Fair (though things technically got underway last night) at MOMA’s PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. Sponsored by Printed Matter, the non-profit institution dedicated to the promotion of artists’ books and material ephemera, the Fair features cutting-edge art organizations, journals, scholars (Boris Groys), and contemporary artists (Paul Chan and Kristin Lucas, among them), alongside over 200 exhibitors, including native Chicagoans Soberscove Press and Temporary Services. In celebration of the conference, we’d like to point you toward some events and exhibitions organized around the work of one of our own purveyors of that soon-to-be discussed art-book hybrid, Press author Josiah McElheny. McElheny’s The Light Club: On Paul Scheerbart’s “The Light Club of Batavia” has already enjoyed a profile in ARTnews, a centenary party cohosted by Cabinet, and mention in the Chronicle of Higher Education. A recent editor’s choice review in BOMB engages the book in sum: The slim volume The Light Club reveals McElheny’s passion for modernity’s early days, its promises, its failures, and its forgotten stories. The book offers the first English translation of Der Lichtklub von Batavia, a futuristic satire from 1912 by German novelist and theorist Paul Scheerbart, who . . .

June 9, 2010

Looking to indulge your literary side this weekend? Join the University of Chicago Press at the 2010 Printer’s Row Lit Fest this Saturday and Sunday, June 12-13. Not only will the Press be on site selling our fabulous wares, plenty of Press authors will be on hand reading from and discussing their books. Here’s a lowdown of what’s happening at the Fest. All weekend long, the Press will be selling our books at our booth (located in Tent O, which will be closer to Polk than Harrison. This is a new location for us, as our usual spot will be occupied by construction equipment. Use this map to find us). We’ll have our newest releases, as well as many of our most popular Chicago titles and stunning picture books (all of which make great gifts for Dad!). We’ll also be bringing back our popular $5 table: everything on it will cost you just one portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Among the books you’ll find on the discount table will be Roger Ebert’s Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, Normal Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, and Mike Royko’s One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko. Supplies of these . . .

June 8, 2010

Photographer Stanley Greenberg, whose new book Architecture under Construction offers a fascinating collection of images of some of our most unusual new buildings in the process of being built, is currently exhibiting part of the collection featured in the book in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing, Kurokawa Gallery. From a press release on the AIC’s website: While avant-garde architecture has frequently inspired today’s art photographers and video artists, Stanley Greenberg is the first to focus a documentary-style lens on the subject. Greenberg’s luminous large-scale black-and-white photographs explore avant-garde structures in the process of being built. Using highly cropped views, Greenberg captures moments in the assembly of architecture that are rarely evident in the final building, revealing the complexity of contemporary construction and the residual visual unfolding of spaces resulting from these feats of structural gymnastics. Find out more about the exhibit, or, if a trip to downtown Chicago isn’t on your agenda before the close in September, check out our gallery of photographs from the book. . . .

April 20, 2010

Andrew Piper’s Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age explores literary culture at the turn of the nineteenth century to show how, alongside the period’s innovations in mass printing, romantic writing and writers themselves played crucial roles in creating the age’s “bookish culture.” And in keeping with the theme of his book, Piper will appear at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival on Saturday, April 24, at 1 p.m to participate in a panel discussion titled: “Reading the World: The Future of the Book” as part of the five-day long festivities, which begin Wednesday. An article on the festival in the Saturday edition of the Montreal Gazette cites Piper on the “bookish culture” of today: When McGill professor Andrew Piper was a child, punishment meant being sent to his room to read. Today, if the father of two metes out punishment to either his 5-year-old son or 3-year-old daughter, it means taking away a bedtime story, be it Scaredy Squirrel’s latest adventure or a Frog and Toad tale. Piper grew into his love of books and became an expert on the relationship between the book and literature in the 18th and 19th centuries. . . .